About Jason Thibeault

Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

I have opinions. So do you. You want to share them with me. I would like to do likewise. Please don't expect a platform for proselytizing that will go unchecked and unchallenged, though. Contact me via the clicky thingies under my banner.

The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember -- this is my property, not yours.

I honestly don’t have a ton of respect for AC’s interview style most times, but I felt a real pang of empathy when he put his chin on his hand halfway through this. He was giving this lady the easiest questions imaginable and she was completely failing to address them. She wasn’t even trying, it seemed. What’s worse is, AC was obviously intentionally going easy on her, ratcheting DOWN the questions as she seemed progressively incapable of answering them, handling her first with kid gloves then padding them in Nerf foam.

I’m curious. Does anyone know of any anti-gay bigotry that ISN’T inspired by rampant and ridiculous levels of religiosity?

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About the author

Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

I have opinions. So do you. You want to share them with me. I would like to do likewise. Please don't expect a platform for proselytizing that will go unchecked and unchallenged, though. Contact me via the clicky thingies under my banner.

The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember -- this is my property, not yours.

dorfl, Yes, that is what I remember, too, from an admittedly decades-ago reading of “The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals” by Richard Plant. I remember it attesting that there was the death penalty under both Hitler and Stalin for (male) homosexuality; I don’t believe lesbianism was technically against the law in either, although it could be sometimes severely punished anyway, of course.

In 1933, the Soviet government, under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, recriminalised homosexual activity, most probably to improve the strained relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, who considered homosexuality sinful.

Yeah, I don’t know how much that’s a post-hoc rationalization of Stalin’s policies though, dorfl. It seems to me they needed the “hard labor” anyway, so they criminalized quite a few underclasses. That the ROC would have liked it might just have been gravy.

But yes, it’s pretty damn difficult to find some anti-gay sentiment that doesn’t originate in religion at its base. Then again all religious objections to homosexuality seem to come from their authors finding gayness icky so “first cause” is really bigotry anyway.

Communist regimes generally criminalized behavior that they see as detrimental to society. Homosexuality would fall under that because in their eyes it doesn’t help families. They just want people to breed good little communists.

That’s not necessarily the case however. East Germany for example, de facto decriminalized homosexuality in the 1950s. Interestingly, a court made that decision, ruling that it’s a minor issue that usually shouldn’t be punished. In the 1960s, they decriminalized consensual gay sex and only kept provisions related to sex with minors. In the 1980s, even that was removed from the criminal code. They were decades ahead of both West Germany and the US with that. Not that that the country was a bastion of human rights, but they got at least that one right.

In the 1987 an East German court wrote this:
“homosexuality, just like heterosexuality, represents a variant of sexual behavior. Homosexual people do therefore not stand outside socialist society, and the civil rights are warranted to them exactly as to all other citizens.”

Compare to Bowers v Hardwick, which was decided in the US at the same time and not overturned until 2003.

slc1: a) possibly; b) not really relevant here; c) until he comes out on his own, calling him gay denies his right to sexual self-determination. Just because a few media sources have declared him gay doesn’t mean he is until and unless he says so himself.

I’m not sure it counts, but I have heard some people decry homosexuality on the grounds that it’s not ‘natural’ or that because it’s not directly procreative that it must be ‘evolutionarily wrong.’ One wonders if these same people object to birth control, or to antibiotics, which obviously completely upset the natural order. I say I’m not sure this counts because it’s obviously not based on sounds scientific or moral reasoning and may be more an example of ‘scientism’ than anything else.

In 1933, Article 121 was added to the criminal code, for the entire Soviet Union, that expressly prohibited male homosexuality, with up to five years of hard labor in prison. The precise reason for the new law is still in some dispute.

This being the Soviet Union, it’s possible that the “hard labor” was a de facto death penalty, but I don’t really know.

Anderson had himself quite the job to pull off there, in that she was making such a complete fool of herself on camera, if he lit into her position the way it deserved, he would have come across as the Big Bad TV Personality picking on the poor persecuted believer.

I recently had a discussion about the recent annular eclipse with someone who was insisting that moonrise is caused every night by the Moon orbiting around the earth, and that the basic mechanism of moonrise operated differently from sunrise because the moon orbits the earth and the sun doesn’t. He was also absolutely convinced that he was right.

The point of the example being that it’s really hard to have a discussion with someone who has such a complete and fundamental misapprehension of the facts. You end up interminably wallowing in the other guy’s ignorance. There is nowhere that truth can even stick, let alone apply leverage. It’s the proverbial trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.

dorfl (#1): “Iirc, the Soviet union wasn’t the most gay-friendly country either.”

The Soviet Union was ruled by ideology, the worship of the state, which is no different than the worship of mythical gods. Fascism, communism, religion and corporatism all use the same methods and techniques to justify their violence against minorities in the population.

I blogged on this already- and my post was a bit of a mess. I started out with the premise that I feel sorry for this lady- that she really was so amazingly inept at answering questions that I can’t imagine anyone preparing for such an interview to be unprepared for.

Her answer to the very first question was horrible: “yes, he said that, but he doesn’t really think it- and you guys are going to twist his statements to mean what you want them to.”

The pastor’s statement wasn’t ambiguous. It wasn’t open to interpretation.

You can actually witness her change from distancing to double down….mid-sentence!

I ended up just mocking her like everyone else has. You can’t help it- it’s not even a case of “low hanging fruit”- the fruit is being served to you prepared with whipped cream and chocolate fondue.

I agree that Stalinism had all sorts of things in common with religion. But I don’t think we can say that it was a religion. Not if we want to stick to any definition of the word ‘religion’ that people actually use, anyway.

I agree. It’s even possible Stalin just got a vague idea one day that homosexuality needed to be stopped, and once that idea was in his head he simply never questioned it. In history class I got the impression that he was pretty prone to doing that kind of thing.

The YouTube app comes preinstalled on iOS devices (at least, all the ones I’ve handled). The Safari browser normally handles YouTube links and embeds just fine using that app. Might be a networking issue, if local WiFi is blocking YouTube.

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